Telstra restores Japan cable link

Staff staying in Tokyo for now

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Telstra International has reported that all services have been fully restored to its undersea cable infrastructure in Japan.

Meanwhile Chunghwa Telecom is struggling to restore full services to the damaged cables APCN-2 and Japan-US which serve as links for internet and voice services between Taiwan with the US. The Taiwanese carrier said that bandwidth of its services had been reduced by around 30 per cent.

Telstra International confirmed that there was some minimal infrastructure and service disruption to the network following the earthquake and tsunami but the network remained operational in and out of Japan.

Impact was experienced following the failure of the northern Pacific route cables out of Japan (JUS and APCN 2). "Through our network contingency plans, the team was able to fully recover all services using the Tata Global Network (TGN), China-US (CHUS) and Asia America Gateway (AAG) cables systems for connection over the pacific. Customers have experienced fully restored services with bandwidth ranges from 2M to 10G."

All services were fully restored as of Tuesday, March 15. Following the disaster Telstra's IP services were immediately switched over to unaffected cable capacity.

The Reach North Asia Loop (RNAL) and AJC (Australia-Japan), cable systems weren’t affected by the earthquake.

AJC CEO Robin Russell confirmed to The Register that "the AJC network has not been interrupted by the earthquake and tsunamis in Japan. We continue to provide full service to our customers and are doing what we can to help deal with the communications issues that have arisen through outages on other submarine networks."

Telstra International PoPs and cable landing stations, maintain services on back-up power sources, and the carrier said it was confident that it can manage any power outages over the coming days and weeks.

Telstra said all staff and employees based in Japan have been accounted for by at this point it will not be evacuating employees from the Tokyo office.

"Their safety is of the utmost importance to us, however our employees are Japanese local residents and they choose to be with their family and friends at this time. We are working closely with the local management team to monitor the situation and we will continue to support our employees throughout this extremely difficult time," the carrier said.

Telstra has seen voice volumes surge more than 17 times over the previous 24 hours, placing strain on the network. As a result of this demand, Telstra has announced free telephone calls and text messages for customers wishing to check on family and friends affected by the disaster until Friday 25 March. ®